Tag: 100 Buttercups

Fife Contemporary – Covid-19 Update

It’s hard to believe in some ways that we’re now into our 7th month since lockdown began in late March. The stockpiling of toilet rolls, tins of tomatoes and pasta has eased as most of us have got used to a different rhythm to life and we truly hope it’s not about to start again.

Fife Contemporary has been more fortunate than venue-based arts’ organisations who rely heavily on ticket income to keep all the wheels turning. However, we have had a major exhibition (Lines from Scotland) stuck in limbo – it was only open to the public for a matter of days before lockdown began. We’ve also had to cancel various public events, which is of course a great shame.

But we’ve found other ways to keep busy…

Online content – it’s virtually the way to go

If you follow our social media or receive our email newsflash, you’ll hopefully have noticed that we’ve been adding much more content to our website. Here’s what’s new so far:

• Lines from Scotland Online – INSIGHTS 1-10 (featuring some of the participating artists & curator Amanda Game) available now and several more to look forward to!
• Care Making for Good – an online exhibition to celebrate the first Phase of our project with Fife carers.
• Fife Portraits for LGBT+ History Month 2019 – to mark Fife Pride which was to have taken place on 4 July, we published this online exhibition of photographic portraits made last year by 2 LGBT+ youth groups in Fife.
• 100 Buttercups Education Pack – inspired by Laurie Clark’s beautifully drawn flower portraits & featured as part of Engage’s Children’s Art Week 2020.

There is more coming shortly to this web space, including the next in our series of Materialise exhibitions, supporting recent craft & design graduates/new makers.

And there’s more!

If you receive our newsflash, you may have noticed a change of content and style. This was partly in the pipeline anyway as our Artist Development Officer Stefanie Cheong took over the reins from me on 1 April. But with supporting artists still at the forefront of what we do, lockdown meant it was important to focus on how artists are surviving – see her new Artist Stories’ series.

Our blog now includes a variety of posts from Diana and Susan and more On This Day content from Arlene.

Looking forward

We are continuing to plan with our partners and are delighted (relieved?) that Lines from Scotland re-opened safely at DCL&G in Dunfermline in mid-August. In addition, we’re looking at blending virtual experiences with real ones, and how we can continue to reach audiences with Craft Pods’ exhibitions.

Join us for a celebration of Black History Month on 29 October 2020 on Zoom.Meanwhile, keep safe and well, and please get in touch with us by email or social media as we continue to work from home.

– The Fife Contemporary Team

Lockdown Posts 2

We are missing so many anticipated exhibitions – and online content cannot replace the shows we didn’t manage to see before lockdown, which may never re-open to visitors. The minor grieving we experience for these, recalls how we feel about the many exhibitions we failed to make time or effort to see in the past.

A card for Sitting & Looking, produced by IC: Innovative Craft for the Dovecot Studios, with support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2010, was perched on a ledge in my office until we had to hurriedly vacate ten years later. This was an exhibition curated by furniture makers Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley which I imagined invited the viewer to engage more deeply with work by simply slowing down and looking. The premise spoke to me of a shared belief in taking time to look in order to understand, but ironically, and to my continuing frustration, I missed the exhibition. Its title however remains a mantra.

During lockdown I have, through necessity and opportunity, been applying the principle of taking time and looking to nature rather than art. Less sitting and more walking in a rich coastal environment. As with art I privilege my intuitive and visceral responses allied to my knowledge and experience. While I’m prompted to refer to basic guides and question friends, I feel that concentrated observation provides most satisfaction and lasting understanding. I’ve avoided carrying anything that I can take photographs with on most walks, as that framing of the landscape brings a particular frame of mind which lessens a sense of openness to what is to be encountered. The photographs here document elements examined and remembered from a previous expedition in May.

I find myself however seeing aspects of nature through memories of artworks and artists that first made me take note and think about them. It does not reduce the experience but feels like bumping into a friend with welcome recognition.

Artists who primarily make their work within the landscape such as Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long explore the properties and forms of materials they find. A small column of stones on the beach demonstrates the compliment of imitation and the broad audiences their practice has reached. I’m then reminded of the earliest functional arrangements of stones into a fireplace.

Hamish Fulton is another recognised as a ‘walking artist’ who brings philosophy and poetry to the descriptions of his carefully circumscribed walks which he exhibits afterwards in galleries. His approach has a rare quality of rigour and thoughtfulness. Returning to the same paths close to my home I think of the project he undertook with students in Japan. He took them on a walk up a mountain and then repeated the route each day for a week. At first they were rather puzzled and annoyed at what they thought was a lack of variety until they understood that each day the conditions and their experience of place were subtly different.

With many more regular walks I can appreciate not only subtle variations due to light and weather but also more significant seasonal changes. I spot a heron’s nest precariously built in a small pine tree that seems out of scale to the bird, and then watch the young and then emptiness returns. Also on the landward side catkins turn into leaves and a field of grasses matures into barley with green becoming yellow.

The uniqueness and joy provided by small and taken for granted elements of flora is revealed by Laurie Clark through her 100 Buttercups and 100 Harebells books published by WAX366. These sensitive and patiently made portraits explore the individuality of each flower. Buttercups are out now and I notice that yellow is the colour providing accents across the landscape. A couple of primrose patches early on were delicate but now a more vivid gold dominates through gorse, and along the shoreline bird’s-foot trefoil and silverweed arrive before the elegant yellow flags. Ochre patches of lichen decorate the rocks. Yellow is in the air as well, with the goldfinch and yellowhammer attracting attention through song as well as plumage.

Near the village, yellow pops up in the caps and floats of swimmers in the usually abandoned sea pool. Further along the coastal path, human interaction with the landscape continues through the evidence not only of the walkers’ tracks and detritus but also the local livelihoods of farming and fishing. Bob Callender’s fascination with and intimate knowledge of the coastline accompanies me. In marvelling at the colours and patterns of layers of smoothed pebbles I think of his early paintings celebrating the sculptural forms close-up.

Then I remember his later sculpture examining what the tide has washed up, from elegiac boat wrecks to the increasing threat of what made up his Plastic Beach. The tide brings us fragments of social history and geography.

Sea-washed bricks may still reveal the name and distance of the brickworks in which they were made from local clay. They immediately remind me of my delight in discovering a shared interest with Judith Burbidge, in her work cataloguing her collection of found bricks from across Scotland.

Uncertainty surrounds what will be displayed in the future and how, when and where we can travel to fully experience exhibitions. Locally we have a changing display provided by young artists who have experimented with wildlife painted on stones, colourful windmills and encouraging smiles drawn on wooden spoons. The slowing down effect of lockdown is an aspect worthy of maintaining in order to deepen our personal engagement with art. For those of us fortunate enough to have been able to practice looking within the natural environment we also need to continue that practice and find some of the inspiration artists have shared with us.

100 Buttercups: Children’s Art Week 2020

Several years ago, Fife Contemporary worked with artist Laurie Clark on her project with David Bellingham (WAX366) ‘100 Buttercups’. Over 100 days, Laurie made 100 drawings of 100 unique buttercups which were then published by David as a limited edition book. To accompany the book’s launch, Laurie gave a drawing workshop to pupils at a local primary school, and we devised an education pack – one for primary-aged children, and one for secondary students (currently being updated).

The education packs, 30+ pages in each, contain details of art & design activities, as well as cross-curricular ideas, which are all inspired by Laurie’s project. Laurie viewed her drawings as portraits of buttercups, and so the primary pack art & design section starts with ideas about observational drawing and portraiture, for example. This is expanded further in the secondary pack, such as, looking at artists’ books and even jewellery-making. Cross-curricular ideas include word games and researching the ecology of wild flowers.

Our free offer

As part of Engage’s Children’s Art Week 2020, we are inviting young people to download a free copy of a pack and have a go at some of the activities inside. Anyone interested can then email us an image of something they’ve drawn or made and we’ll add it to our website later in the summer.

• 100 Buttercups’ Education Pack (for 8-12s/primary-aged)
• 100 Buttercups’ Education Pack (for 12+/secondary-aged)

100 Harebells

Laurie Clark has also looked at harebells in great detail, creating 100 drawings of individual flowers which have been published in a further limited edition book by WAX366. You can find out more about Laurie and this project in INSIGHTS 2 (one of a series of web pages created for Fife Contemporary’s exhibition Lines from Scotland Online.

And we’ve more!

If you’ve enjoyed looking at our 100 Buttercups’ education packs, we have created a selection of packs for other projects. You can download these for free too from our website by clicking here (you’ll find the list on the right side of web page).